December 24, 2024 • 24 mins
James begins a 4 part series looking at the history and future of the low lying atoll nation of the Republic of the Marshall Islands. This episode looks at the islands’ nuclear legacy.
Original Air Date: 9.5.23
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
About twenty years ago, maybe thirty, a circus fitted to Majoro,
the largest island on the Marjoro Atoll, in the capital
city of the Marshall Islands. They came to Majoro, as
almost everything that isn't breadfruit, pandanas or fish does on
a boat. After performing, they couldn't find a boat to
take them to the next destination, and so the resident
(00:38):
of this tiny island, which at times is no wider
than the single road which travels its whole length, decided
that they'd have to share the food that they themselves
had imported a great cost, and they set about gathering apples, bananas,
and anything else that they thought an elephant might like
to eat while it waited for a way off an
island that barely has enough room for its own people,
(00:58):
let alone the largest land animal on earth. The people
of the Marshall Islands, for whom hospitality is as natural
as the times of the sea, greet each other the
same way they do strangers, by saying yo quai. The
word has several meanings, but I'll let David Kaboo explain them.
He's the President of the Republic of the Marshal Islands,
(01:18):
so he seems like he'd be a good source.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
I would say the word yupid ye, greeting word yaguey.
There's a lot of several meanings, and you can say
when you meet someone first time, you say yagohey. When
you greet someone, and when you also say goodbye, instead
of saying goodbye, you also say yupe, So you can
(01:43):
use that also, like during the weekend there was a
tournament fishing tournament, and if you were fishing and you
got it, you have a big fish on the land
and you really m hm, You're about to land the fish,
but the lands snap. So what do you say?
Speaker 3 (02:04):
Say?
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Oh, yeah, yeah, way, hello to the fish. But you
just say yeah but because you lost the pit catch.
So it can be said way like when you lose
someone or someone passed away. You've missed that prison, yup
way so and so he was here but no one
could hear, so we do said yep way. So it
has several meanings. But the deeper meaning of yuppoy is
(02:28):
you are beautiful like the rainbow. Yeah means rainbow and ways,
so we combine the two words. You are a rainbow
and you are beautiful as a rainbow.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
On the map, the Marshall Islands look like the little
dots that appear in my photos of the beach at Margiro.
But unlike there's little specks of dust that manage to
sneak their way onto my camera center, Marshall Islands belong here.
Here is a pretty vague turn. The twenty nine coral
atolls and five islands that allow fifty four one thousand
Marshalies to live on one hundred and eighty two square
(03:03):
kilometers of land span an oceanic territory of two hundred
thousand kilometers. It's like you took a small American town
and scattered it across an area more than a half
times the size of Alaska. Even though the Rami is
ninety eight percent water, every inch of land is precious
to the marshal Eisee, whose matrilineal society ensures that land
(03:23):
passes from mother to daughter and ties families to the
remote islands that make up the low lying atolls of
the Republic. It was on one of the bigger chunks
of land that I recorded the music you heard a
minute ago. Marjorro is an atoll that's a coral ring
that encircles the lagoon and Its biggest island is about
thirty miles long, but often less than one hundred yards wide.
(03:47):
There's one road that runs the length of it and
sometimes also spans the width of it. It's also home
to about half the Ramis population. The highest point on
the atoll lies just three meters above sea level. If
you want to go high that than you are only
options are houses or palm trees. From the top of
the fifth floor of the NAPA Autoparts Store, which also
(04:08):
houses the UNDP and the Marshal Arwanns Olympic Committee, you
can see the whole island. For Marshallese people, these tiny
pieces of paradise that barely poke their heads out from
the top of the ocean are everything. Their land and
their ties to it defined them. Without their place, they
can't be themselves. Even though many thousands of Marshallese live
(04:31):
in the diasper of the United States, they're still important.
Handicrafts made from little shells and the outer islands and
coconut husks. Many of them come back to the islands
to retire, but slowly the ocean is taking those islands back.
Rising sea levels and more extreme tidal surges have placed
this tiny Pacific nation on the front lines of climate change.
(04:54):
There isn't an exact estimate as to how long the
Marshall Islands have or what they can do to hold
creeping advance of the ocean. They've always existed on just
a few square kilometers of land among millions of square
kilometers of ocean, and they depend on that ocean for everything.
But now it's threatening to take everything away from them.
One day. They fear their islands will become uninhabitable. A
(05:16):
salt water invads of water table and their trees die,
while storms bring more and more frequent floods that sweep
away their homes and their possessions. They don't want to leave,
but they can't stand alone against climate change either. But
the Marshalis are resilient people. They've weathered many storms to
get to where they are now. The tiny museum in
(05:37):
Maduro hosts artifacts of several crises that would seem apocalyptic,
a nuclear bomb, the Second World War, but in the
end these did little to cruss the incredible kindness of
the tenacity of the Marshalies. The islands that make up
the Aramai have been inhabited by indigenous people for thousands
of years. They've been variously ruled by the Spanish, German, Japanese,
(06:02):
and United States governments before becoming an independent republic. Before
they were named by a British sailor, the islands had
their own name. I'll let Jeff a Marshal's renaissance man,
who was at one side driver, the head of the
World Health Organization's EMT program on the islands, a registered nurse,
and the custod units. An incredible collection of Marshal E's
(06:24):
music explained what they were called before that.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Or before he used to call La la la larie like.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
L or l.
Speaker 4 (06:37):
L l O L L luck l A P l
A P.
Speaker 5 (06:43):
That's before it turned out turns into Marshall.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Because this word Marshall games from.
Speaker 5 (06:51):
This kandeh abound these islands.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Captain Marshall undeniably, the Marshall Islands are not a bad
place to find yourself on a summer afternoon, and in
the time I spent there, I took several trips at
the smaller islands around mydro Atoll. They look like the
Platonic ideal of a tropical island, complete with coconut palms,
vibrant coral reefs, white sand at turquoise water. I love
(07:18):
free diving and dropping down onto a wrecked aircraft and
dozens of brightly colored species of fish in almost infinite
visibility without even needing to put on a wet to
or a weight belt. Might be the closest I'll ever
get to flying. But I wasn't just here for a
dip in the ocean. I'm actually here to tell you
a story of incredible resilience. Much of America, both on
(07:39):
the left and on the right, spends much of its
time and money preparing for its own imagined version of
the crisis. For some, that's the unimaginable destruction of nuclear war.
For others, it's the encroaching of the ocean on It's
the land and a resulting loss of places to live
and grow food. And for others, it's a collapse of
basic services like power and clean water that we take
for granted. These are all storms, so the tiny island
(08:03):
nation has already weathered, and it hasn't done so in
the atomized and individualistic way that so many American preppers
fantasize about online. It's done so as an incredibly strong, optimistic,
and welcoming community there's a lot we can learn from
the people of the Marshall Islands in their story, and
so this week I'll be doing my best to share
the stories that they shared with me. If you're familiar
(08:39):
with the islands, it's likely because of the history of
one of the other atolls in the group, Bikini Atoll.
The name is the German bastardization of a Marshal lease
word pikini pick meaning plain surface, and knee meaning coconut tree.
It's a flat based where coconuts career, but you likely
don't know the island for its coconuts, and those aren't
(09:01):
safe to eat anymore. Anyway. If you've heard of Bikinia Toll,
it's because of what the United States did there After
the Second World War, on the eighteenth of July and
nineteen forty seven, the Marshall Islands were placed in a
Strategic Trust territory by the United Nations. This territory was
administered by the United States, which are supposed to administer
the islands in the best interest of their inhabitants out
(09:22):
of international peace and security. But a year before the
trust territory was created, the US began nuclear testing and
the lagoon at Bikinia Toll, a site that would, over
the next fifteen years, become the most heavily bombed place
on Earth, with some islands entirely removed from the map,
and much of their population left dead, sick, and without
(09:44):
the land that defines them and their ability to thrive
on these tiany islands amidst the endless ocean. As far
as possible, I want to let the marshal Lease survivors
of the nuclear tests and their families tell their own stories.
They call what happened on Bikini and awaa Atoll the
nuclear legacy of their country. Talking about the nuclear legacy
(10:04):
is a difficult topic for the Marshallese, especially the time
when none of them have been paid the compensation they
were allotted, and the US was negotiating a new agreement
with the Marshalise government. It was very far from settled,
and the numbers of the US were offering were very
far from sufficient. I was very fortunate to join a
few other journalists on the tiny island of boken bowten,
(10:25):
a short boat right away from Mitro and home to
perhaps most beautiful coral reef I've ever seen. We had lunch,
walked around the island and then had a talk on
the nuclear legacy from descendants of some of the survivors.
I'll let them introduce themselves.
Speaker 6 (10:40):
My name is Zakabekibion. I'm from the Marshall Allen. I
am a student at CMI College of the Marshall Allen
and I am currently the president for the CMI Nuclear Club,
which we mostly work under National Nuclear Commission with with
(11:01):
our director Mary Souk and now our Commissioner Ariana.
Speaker 4 (11:06):
All right, yeah, once again, my name is Ariana. I
work as a Commissioner and Nuclear Justice Envoy for the
r m I National Nuclear Commission. Him once again, thank
you very much for having us this afternoon, Yael.
Speaker 7 (11:23):
Welcome to the Marshall Island. My name is Evlin Ralpho.
I'm the director for Education and Public Awareness. Once you
can welcome, enjoy the rest of your days here.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
My name is Sinceretian Pernet. I work with the National
Nuclear Commission as an heapman and physical officer. I'm not
sure if it's necessary for me to come, but since
the post that we all go so support the post
go work on the same poet, Welcome to the Partial Islands.
Speaker 7 (11:54):
She's from Mayata, she's from.
Speaker 4 (11:58):
Yeah, the three of us are all descendants of nuclear survivors.
They were exposed to fall out. Her mother was exposed
to fall out. Her mother, Grace's mother was also exposed
to the radioactive fallout, as well as my great grandfather.
I think that's what really drives us to share this
(12:19):
with you.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Almost everyone in the RMI has a family member directly
impacted by the testing and the decades of mistreatment that
came after it. Although we know the name Bikinia Toll,
the entire republic was impacted by nuclear fallout, including Madro itself,
thanks to the elevised decision to drop bombs on a
day when the populated atolls were downwind at the test site.
(12:42):
In fact, right next to our hotel and showing the
same parking lot, there's the US Department of Energy Office AUS. Jeff,
what that was doing there?
Speaker 5 (12:50):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (12:50):
I saw there's a diary office health office in the
street here.
Speaker 5 (12:56):
The one in the next to the autel, that's the
office where it through the radiation testing. And there's some
one near the AMI R. Marshall. That's the planet for
those survivors. Now, the survivors, there's few of them, like
maybe less than.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
Fifty wow the RMI saw fighting in the Second World War.
It's memorialized in murals. Across Marjorro. In nineteen forty three
and early nineteen forty four, the USA bombed and then
fought the Imperial Japanese military, who have been occupying the
island since nineteen fourteen. US soldiers and marines, along with
(13:36):
marsha Ley's scouts, landed on Marjorro, Quadulion in anywhere up
on Higgins boats that were virtually identical to the boat
we took across the lagoon to Bocan Boten. The fighting
was fierce and the scale of the destruction was immets. Overall,
the Americans lost six hundred and eleven men, which suffered
two three hundred and forty one wounded. Two hundred and
(13:58):
sixty one were missing. Meanwhile, the Japanese lost over eleven
thousand men and had three hundred and fifty eight captured. Today,
the Bikinia Toll Lagoon still holds the ghostly remains of
the ships and plains that fought that battle, alongside the Nagato,
the flagship of the Imperial Japanese Navy, and the ship
(14:19):
from whose bridge Admiral Yamamoto launched the attack on Pearl Harbor.
It was a shadow of this war that was evoked
in nineteen forty six, when one hundred and sixty seven
a Bikinia Tolls inhabitants were forcibly relocated by the United States.
They initially accepted this settlement quote for the good of
mankind and to end all wars, in the words of
(14:40):
the US commandant at the time. Assisted by US Navy seabees,
they disassembled their church and moved to different atolls. Nine
of the eleven family heads from Bikini elected to be
transported one hundred and twenty five miles to Rohngerikatoll, an
island with about one quarter of the land mass of Bikini.
(15:01):
Many believed the island to be haunted. By the time
the Navy left them with a few weeks of water
and food, they had every reason to be afraid. I'll
let Ariana explain what that removal process was like.
Speaker 4 (15:13):
They had asked the people if they were willing to
give up their homelands for the good of mankind and
to end all wars. And because our people are people
of faith in Christianity, they the and they were very afraid.
They did not want to leave, but because of the
amount of power that the that the military showed up
(15:36):
with with their big ships compared to our small canoes,
and the amount of troops that were on that island
on that morning, it was very hard for them to,
you know, fight against what was being asked of them.
And if you have time to look through documentaries of
(15:58):
the nuclear legacy, you will see a port where the
commander or commodore, his name was Ben Wyatt. He was
sitting down and asking the chief at that time, can
we use this island for the good of mankind? And
in response the people all respond in unison elman, which
means okay. And from their testimonies, they had to take
(16:20):
that shot over forty times to make sure that, you know,
they all said emmin at the same time, to get
the best shot they could for you know, maybe for
reports to the UN. But it was a very frustrating
time for them.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Following their removal, the testing began. The idea was to
test nuclear bombs on ships, so the US bought ninety
five ships fully loaded with weapons and fuel. At this time,
this would have ranked the Navy of Bikini Toll just
outside the top five biggest fleets in the world, but
those boats didn't stay afloat for long. Now you might
(17:09):
think that, given the testing was on ships, the atoll's
navy would be some kind of mid century Mary Celeste,
but you'd be wrong. Three hundred and fifty experimental rats, goats,
and pigs died in the service as its strange nuclear experiment,
some of them after being subjected to the great indignity
of being covered in sunscreen, which bizarrely scientists thought might
(17:32):
be useful in alleviating the impact of radiation. It's rather
staggering that this research was being done three years after
the United States dropped nuclear bombs on whole cities full
of human beings. But as you've maybe already picked up
in this story, the possibility of unintended but entirely predictable
human suffering does not seem to have been top of
(17:52):
the priority list. The first test of the island somehow misfired.
The gathered press were disappointed in many of them went home,
but the second code, named Baker didn't. Chemist Glen t. Seborg,
the longest serving chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, called
the Baker test the world's first nuclear disaster. It drove
(18:14):
a two thousand foot wide pillar of water into the air.
It sunk the USS Arkansas and released massive amounts of
radiation across the islands of the atoll, which at the
time the residents had been expecting to return to. Just
five days after the first bomb went off, Louis Road,
a French mechanical engineer who was working as manager of
(18:35):
his mother's lingerie shop in Paris, introduced a new swimsuit
designed named the Bikini after the atoll. It was one
wright equipped the atom bomb of fashion. The people of
the atoll, however, gained little from the outfit or the testing.
January of nineteen forty eight, just two years after their removal,
(18:58):
doctor Leonard Mason visited the Bikini Rongrik and was appalled
to find the people there had almost starved to death.
We were dying, but they didn't listen to us, one
of them, said to him. Mason, an anthropologist at the
University of WAYI asked that food and water be bought immediately.
(19:18):
The US built houses for Bikini Atol residents on Ujilangatoll,
but it decided to use these for the residents of
Aniwata Katoll, where it was also about to begin conducting
nuclear experiments. Instead, the Bikini Islanders were placed in tents
alongside a runway before they eventually chose Kille Island, a
line of less than one square kilometer, as their next home.
(19:43):
Also evacuated where Anewatak, Wrongalap, and Wathaw Islanders. They too
thought this was a temporary arrangement and that they could
go home in a short period of time. They too
found out later that this was not the case. Over
the course of their exile, they've been moved several more times,
staffed half to death, cheated their compensation, and stripped to
(20:04):
their ancestral homeland. For the next twelve years, the United
States would drop increasingly large bombs, culminating in nineteen fifty
four with the Bravo Shot of Operation Castle, also known
as Castle Bravo, the biggest nuclear device that we know
of the US ever deploying.
Speaker 4 (20:22):
Within those twelve years, there were sixty seven known devices
that were tested here. There could have been more, but
all we know of is sixty seven. One of them
was the Castle Bravo shat that yielded fifteen megatons, which,
when scientists calculated the equivalent of the Bravo shat would
(20:43):
have required testing the Hiroshima bomb one and a half
times every single day for twelve years.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
That fifteen megaton Bravo shot yielded more than two point
five times the estimated six megaton explosion. When it was
detonated on an artificial island in the Aichinia Toll, the
device's mushroom cloud reached a height of forty seven thousand feet,
which is fourteen hundred meters, and a diameter of seven
miles or eleven kilometers in about one minute. Eventually it
(21:13):
reached a height of forty kilometers and a diameter of
one hundred kilometers. This took less than ten minutes, traveled
more than one hundred meters per second, and covered seven
thousand kilometers of the Pacific Ocean and everything in it
with nuclear fallout. On the eve of the Bravo shot,
weather reports indicated that the quote conditions were getting less favorable,
(21:36):
but nonetheless the decision to go ahead with the first
test was taken by to Alvin Sea Graves jointed task
for seven ships located thirty miles east of Bikini and
what was thought to be an upwin position began detecting
high levels of radiation just two hours after the test.
Very soon after, they began traveling south at full speed
(21:58):
to avoid the fallout, but directly down window the blast
and unable to travel wrong. A lap and a Lingena
Atolls Arianna explained the impact to fall out there, which
residents were not warned about. American service people there want
to stay inside, not eat or drink anything, but no
such warning was given to the local residents.
Speaker 4 (22:19):
Some said it looked like the sky was changing colors
from red to yellow to orange. It was just a
very very bright morning and then they started hearing like
thunderous roars a couple of minutes later, and it was
just like roars after Wars. And it was a very
frightening time because this was just not something you know,
(22:40):
does not happen every day. And then around ten am,
the fallout had started to arrive. And these are accounts
from ronlap at All, which is the closest to Bikini.
The fallout had started to arrive and they were not
sure what was going on. There was men out fishing.
There was also stories these witnesses that prior to this
(23:04):
test the military had gone to and they had movie
nights and they would show the community of movies where
it's snowing.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
Tomorrow, we'll hear more about the consequences of the Bravo
shop for the people who, despite never having any quarrel
with the USA, with the recipient of the largest nuclear
bomb it's ever decimated. It Could Happen Here as a
(23:51):
production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool
Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com, or
check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for
It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia dot com
slash sources.
Speaker 4 (24:07):
Thanks for listening.
About twenty years ago, maybe thirty, a circus fitted to Majoro,
the largest island on the Marjoro Atoll, in the capital
city of the Marshall Islands. They came to Majoro, as
almost everything that isn't breadfruit, pandanas or fish does on
a boat. After performing, they couldn't find a boat to
take them to the next destination, and so the resident
(00:38):
of this tiny island, which at times is no wider
than the single road which travels its whole length, decided
that they'd have to share the food that they themselves
had imported a great cost, and they set about gathering apples, bananas,
and anything else that they thought an elephant might like
to eat while it waited for a way off an
island that barely has enough room for its own people,
(00:58):
let alone the largest land animal on earth. The people
of the Marshall Islands, for whom hospitality is as natural
as the times of the sea, greet each other the
same way they do strangers, by saying yo quai. The
word has several meanings, but I'll let David Kaboo explain them.
He's the President of the Republic of the Marshal Islands,
(01:18):
so he seems like he'd be a good source.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
I would say the word yupid ye, greeting word yaguey.
There's a lot of several meanings, and you can say
when you meet someone first time, you say yagohey. When
you greet someone, and when you also say goodbye, instead
of saying goodbye, you also say yupe, So you can
(01:43):
use that also, like during the weekend there was a
tournament fishing tournament, and if you were fishing and you
got it, you have a big fish on the land
and you really m hm, You're about to land the fish,
but the lands snap. So what do you say?
Speaker 3 (02:04):
Say?
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Oh, yeah, yeah, way, hello to the fish. But you
just say yeah but because you lost the pit catch.
So it can be said way like when you lose
someone or someone passed away. You've missed that prison, yup
way so and so he was here but no one
could hear, so we do said yep way. So it
has several meanings. But the deeper meaning of yuppoy is
(02:28):
you are beautiful like the rainbow. Yeah means rainbow and ways,
so we combine the two words. You are a rainbow
and you are beautiful as a rainbow.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
On the map, the Marshall Islands look like the little
dots that appear in my photos of the beach at Margiro.
But unlike there's little specks of dust that manage to
sneak their way onto my camera center, Marshall Islands belong here.
Here is a pretty vague turn. The twenty nine coral
atolls and five islands that allow fifty four one thousand
Marshalies to live on one hundred and eighty two square
(03:03):
kilometers of land span an oceanic territory of two hundred
thousand kilometers. It's like you took a small American town
and scattered it across an area more than a half
times the size of Alaska. Even though the Rami is
ninety eight percent water, every inch of land is precious
to the marshal Eisee, whose matrilineal society ensures that land
(03:23):
passes from mother to daughter and ties families to the
remote islands that make up the low lying atolls of
the Republic. It was on one of the bigger chunks
of land that I recorded the music you heard a
minute ago. Marjorro is an atoll that's a coral ring
that encircles the lagoon and Its biggest island is about
thirty miles long, but often less than one hundred yards wide.
(03:47):
There's one road that runs the length of it and
sometimes also spans the width of it. It's also home
to about half the Ramis population. The highest point on
the atoll lies just three meters above sea level. If
you want to go high that than you are only
options are houses or palm trees. From the top of
the fifth floor of the NAPA Autoparts Store, which also
(04:08):
houses the UNDP and the Marshal Arwanns Olympic Committee, you
can see the whole island. For Marshallese people, these tiny
pieces of paradise that barely poke their heads out from
the top of the ocean are everything. Their land and
their ties to it defined them. Without their place, they
can't be themselves. Even though many thousands of Marshallese live
(04:31):
in the diasper of the United States, they're still important.
Handicrafts made from little shells and the outer islands and
coconut husks. Many of them come back to the islands
to retire, but slowly the ocean is taking those islands back.
Rising sea levels and more extreme tidal surges have placed
this tiny Pacific nation on the front lines of climate change.
(04:54):
There isn't an exact estimate as to how long the
Marshall Islands have or what they can do to hold
creeping advance of the ocean. They've always existed on just
a few square kilometers of land among millions of square
kilometers of ocean, and they depend on that ocean for everything.
But now it's threatening to take everything away from them.
One day. They fear their islands will become uninhabitable. A
(05:16):
salt water invads of water table and their trees die,
while storms bring more and more frequent floods that sweep
away their homes and their possessions. They don't want to leave,
but they can't stand alone against climate change either. But
the Marshalis are resilient people. They've weathered many storms to
get to where they are now. The tiny museum in
(05:37):
Maduro hosts artifacts of several crises that would seem apocalyptic,
a nuclear bomb, the Second World War, but in the
end these did little to cruss the incredible kindness of
the tenacity of the Marshalies. The islands that make up
the Aramai have been inhabited by indigenous people for thousands
of years. They've been variously ruled by the Spanish, German, Japanese,
(06:02):
and United States governments before becoming an independent republic. Before
they were named by a British sailor, the islands had
their own name. I'll let Jeff a Marshal's renaissance man,
who was at one side driver, the head of the
World Health Organization's EMT program on the islands, a registered nurse,
and the custod units. An incredible collection of Marshal E's
(06:24):
music explained what they were called before that.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Or before he used to call La la la larie like.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
L or l.
Speaker 4 (06:37):
L l O L L luck l A P l
A P.
Speaker 5 (06:43):
That's before it turned out turns into Marshall.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Because this word Marshall games from.
Speaker 5 (06:51):
This kandeh abound these islands.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Captain Marshall undeniably, the Marshall Islands are not a bad
place to find yourself on a summer afternoon, and in
the time I spent there, I took several trips at
the smaller islands around mydro Atoll. They look like the
Platonic ideal of a tropical island, complete with coconut palms,
vibrant coral reefs, white sand at turquoise water. I love
(07:18):
free diving and dropping down onto a wrecked aircraft and
dozens of brightly colored species of fish in almost infinite
visibility without even needing to put on a wet to
or a weight belt. Might be the closest I'll ever
get to flying. But I wasn't just here for a
dip in the ocean. I'm actually here to tell you
a story of incredible resilience. Much of America, both on
(07:39):
the left and on the right, spends much of its
time and money preparing for its own imagined version of
the crisis. For some, that's the unimaginable destruction of nuclear war.
For others, it's the encroaching of the ocean on It's
the land and a resulting loss of places to live
and grow food. And for others, it's a collapse of
basic services like power and clean water that we take
for granted. These are all storms, so the tiny island
(08:03):
nation has already weathered, and it hasn't done so in
the atomized and individualistic way that so many American preppers
fantasize about online. It's done so as an incredibly strong, optimistic,
and welcoming community there's a lot we can learn from
the people of the Marshall Islands in their story, and
so this week I'll be doing my best to share
the stories that they shared with me. If you're familiar
(08:39):
with the islands, it's likely because of the history of
one of the other atolls in the group, Bikini Atoll.
The name is the German bastardization of a Marshal lease
word pikini pick meaning plain surface, and knee meaning coconut tree.
It's a flat based where coconuts career, but you likely
don't know the island for its coconuts, and those aren't
(09:01):
safe to eat anymore. Anyway. If you've heard of Bikinia Toll,
it's because of what the United States did there After
the Second World War, on the eighteenth of July and
nineteen forty seven, the Marshall Islands were placed in a
Strategic Trust territory by the United Nations. This territory was
administered by the United States, which are supposed to administer
the islands in the best interest of their inhabitants out
(09:22):
of international peace and security. But a year before the
trust territory was created, the US began nuclear testing and
the lagoon at Bikinia Toll, a site that would, over
the next fifteen years, become the most heavily bombed place
on Earth, with some islands entirely removed from the map,
and much of their population left dead, sick, and without
(09:44):
the land that defines them and their ability to thrive
on these tiany islands amidst the endless ocean. As far
as possible, I want to let the marshal Lease survivors
of the nuclear tests and their families tell their own stories.
They call what happened on Bikini and awaa Atoll the
nuclear legacy of their country. Talking about the nuclear legacy
(10:04):
is a difficult topic for the Marshallese, especially the time
when none of them have been paid the compensation they
were allotted, and the US was negotiating a new agreement
with the Marshalise government. It was very far from settled,
and the numbers of the US were offering were very
far from sufficient. I was very fortunate to join a
few other journalists on the tiny island of boken bowten,
(10:25):
a short boat right away from Mitro and home to
perhaps most beautiful coral reef I've ever seen. We had lunch,
walked around the island and then had a talk on
the nuclear legacy from descendants of some of the survivors.
I'll let them introduce themselves.
Speaker 6 (10:40):
My name is Zakabekibion. I'm from the Marshall Allen. I
am a student at CMI College of the Marshall Allen
and I am currently the president for the CMI Nuclear Club,
which we mostly work under National Nuclear Commission with with
(11:01):
our director Mary Souk and now our Commissioner Ariana.
Speaker 4 (11:06):
All right, yeah, once again, my name is Ariana. I
work as a Commissioner and Nuclear Justice Envoy for the
r m I National Nuclear Commission. Him once again, thank
you very much for having us this afternoon, Yael.
Speaker 7 (11:23):
Welcome to the Marshall Island. My name is Evlin Ralpho.
I'm the director for Education and Public Awareness. Once you
can welcome, enjoy the rest of your days here.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
My name is Sinceretian Pernet. I work with the National
Nuclear Commission as an heapman and physical officer. I'm not
sure if it's necessary for me to come, but since
the post that we all go so support the post
go work on the same poet, Welcome to the Partial Islands.
Speaker 7 (11:54):
She's from Mayata, she's from.
Speaker 4 (11:58):
Yeah, the three of us are all descendants of nuclear survivors.
They were exposed to fall out. Her mother was exposed
to fall out. Her mother, Grace's mother was also exposed
to the radioactive fallout, as well as my great grandfather.
I think that's what really drives us to share this
(12:19):
with you.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Almost everyone in the RMI has a family member directly
impacted by the testing and the decades of mistreatment that
came after it. Although we know the name Bikinia Toll,
the entire republic was impacted by nuclear fallout, including Madro itself,
thanks to the elevised decision to drop bombs on a
day when the populated atolls were downwind at the test site.
(12:42):
In fact, right next to our hotel and showing the
same parking lot, there's the US Department of Energy Office AUS. Jeff,
what that was doing there?
Speaker 5 (12:50):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (12:50):
I saw there's a diary office health office in the
street here.
Speaker 5 (12:56):
The one in the next to the autel, that's the
office where it through the radiation testing. And there's some
one near the AMI R. Marshall. That's the planet for
those survivors. Now, the survivors, there's few of them, like
maybe less than.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
Fifty wow the RMI saw fighting in the Second World War.
It's memorialized in murals. Across Marjorro. In nineteen forty three
and early nineteen forty four, the USA bombed and then
fought the Imperial Japanese military, who have been occupying the
island since nineteen fourteen. US soldiers and marines, along with
(13:36):
marsha Ley's scouts, landed on Marjorro, Quadulion in anywhere up
on Higgins boats that were virtually identical to the boat
we took across the lagoon to Bocan Boten. The fighting
was fierce and the scale of the destruction was immets. Overall,
the Americans lost six hundred and eleven men, which suffered
two three hundred and forty one wounded. Two hundred and
(13:58):
sixty one were missing. Meanwhile, the Japanese lost over eleven
thousand men and had three hundred and fifty eight captured. Today,
the Bikinia Toll Lagoon still holds the ghostly remains of
the ships and plains that fought that battle, alongside the Nagato,
the flagship of the Imperial Japanese Navy, and the ship
(14:19):
from whose bridge Admiral Yamamoto launched the attack on Pearl Harbor.
It was a shadow of this war that was evoked
in nineteen forty six, when one hundred and sixty seven
a Bikinia Tolls inhabitants were forcibly relocated by the United States.
They initially accepted this settlement quote for the good of
mankind and to end all wars, in the words of
(14:40):
the US commandant at the time. Assisted by US Navy seabees,
they disassembled their church and moved to different atolls. Nine
of the eleven family heads from Bikini elected to be
transported one hundred and twenty five miles to Rohngerikatoll, an
island with about one quarter of the land mass of Bikini.
(15:01):
Many believed the island to be haunted. By the time
the Navy left them with a few weeks of water
and food, they had every reason to be afraid. I'll
let Ariana explain what that removal process was like.
Speaker 4 (15:13):
They had asked the people if they were willing to
give up their homelands for the good of mankind and
to end all wars. And because our people are people
of faith in Christianity, they the and they were very afraid.
They did not want to leave, but because of the
amount of power that the that the military showed up
(15:36):
with with their big ships compared to our small canoes,
and the amount of troops that were on that island
on that morning, it was very hard for them to,
you know, fight against what was being asked of them.
And if you have time to look through documentaries of
(15:58):
the nuclear legacy, you will see a port where the
commander or commodore, his name was Ben Wyatt. He was
sitting down and asking the chief at that time, can
we use this island for the good of mankind? And
in response the people all respond in unison elman, which
means okay. And from their testimonies, they had to take
(16:20):
that shot over forty times to make sure that, you know,
they all said emmin at the same time, to get
the best shot they could for you know, maybe for
reports to the UN. But it was a very frustrating
time for them.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Following their removal, the testing began. The idea was to
test nuclear bombs on ships, so the US bought ninety
five ships fully loaded with weapons and fuel. At this time,
this would have ranked the Navy of Bikini Toll just
outside the top five biggest fleets in the world, but
those boats didn't stay afloat for long. Now you might
(17:09):
think that, given the testing was on ships, the atoll's
navy would be some kind of mid century Mary Celeste,
but you'd be wrong. Three hundred and fifty experimental rats, goats,
and pigs died in the service as its strange nuclear experiment,
some of them after being subjected to the great indignity
of being covered in sunscreen, which bizarrely scientists thought might
(17:32):
be useful in alleviating the impact of radiation. It's rather
staggering that this research was being done three years after
the United States dropped nuclear bombs on whole cities full
of human beings. But as you've maybe already picked up
in this story, the possibility of unintended but entirely predictable
human suffering does not seem to have been top of
(17:52):
the priority list. The first test of the island somehow misfired.
The gathered press were disappointed in many of them went home,
but the second code, named Baker didn't. Chemist Glen t. Seborg,
the longest serving chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, called
the Baker test the world's first nuclear disaster. It drove
(18:14):
a two thousand foot wide pillar of water into the air.
It sunk the USS Arkansas and released massive amounts of
radiation across the islands of the atoll, which at the
time the residents had been expecting to return to. Just
five days after the first bomb went off, Louis Road,
a French mechanical engineer who was working as manager of
(18:35):
his mother's lingerie shop in Paris, introduced a new swimsuit
designed named the Bikini after the atoll. It was one
wright equipped the atom bomb of fashion. The people of
the atoll, however, gained little from the outfit or the testing.
January of nineteen forty eight, just two years after their removal,
(18:58):
doctor Leonard Mason visited the Bikini Rongrik and was appalled
to find the people there had almost starved to death.
We were dying, but they didn't listen to us, one
of them, said to him. Mason, an anthropologist at the
University of WAYI asked that food and water be bought immediately.
(19:18):
The US built houses for Bikini Atol residents on Ujilangatoll,
but it decided to use these for the residents of
Aniwata Katoll, where it was also about to begin conducting
nuclear experiments. Instead, the Bikini Islanders were placed in tents
alongside a runway before they eventually chose Kille Island, a
line of less than one square kilometer, as their next home.
(19:43):
Also evacuated where Anewatak, Wrongalap, and Wathaw Islanders. They too
thought this was a temporary arrangement and that they could
go home in a short period of time. They too
found out later that this was not the case. Over
the course of their exile, they've been moved several more times,
staffed half to death, cheated their compensation, and stripped to
(20:04):
their ancestral homeland. For the next twelve years, the United
States would drop increasingly large bombs, culminating in nineteen fifty
four with the Bravo Shot of Operation Castle, also known
as Castle Bravo, the biggest nuclear device that we know
of the US ever deploying.
Speaker 4 (20:22):
Within those twelve years, there were sixty seven known devices
that were tested here. There could have been more, but
all we know of is sixty seven. One of them
was the Castle Bravo shat that yielded fifteen megatons, which,
when scientists calculated the equivalent of the Bravo shat would
(20:43):
have required testing the Hiroshima bomb one and a half
times every single day for twelve years.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
That fifteen megaton Bravo shot yielded more than two point
five times the estimated six megaton explosion. When it was
detonated on an artificial island in the Aichinia Toll, the
device's mushroom cloud reached a height of forty seven thousand feet,
which is fourteen hundred meters, and a diameter of seven
miles or eleven kilometers in about one minute. Eventually it
(21:13):
reached a height of forty kilometers and a diameter of
one hundred kilometers. This took less than ten minutes, traveled
more than one hundred meters per second, and covered seven
thousand kilometers of the Pacific Ocean and everything in it
with nuclear fallout. On the eve of the Bravo shot,
weather reports indicated that the quote conditions were getting less favorable,
(21:36):
but nonetheless the decision to go ahead with the first
test was taken by to Alvin Sea Graves jointed task
for seven ships located thirty miles east of Bikini and
what was thought to be an upwin position began detecting
high levels of radiation just two hours after the test.
Very soon after, they began traveling south at full speed
(21:58):
to avoid the fallout, but directly down window the blast
and unable to travel wrong. A lap and a Lingena
Atolls Arianna explained the impact to fall out there, which
residents were not warned about. American service people there want
to stay inside, not eat or drink anything, but no
such warning was given to the local residents.
Speaker 4 (22:19):
Some said it looked like the sky was changing colors
from red to yellow to orange. It was just a
very very bright morning and then they started hearing like
thunderous roars a couple of minutes later, and it was
just like roars after Wars. And it was a very
frightening time because this was just not something you know,
(22:40):
does not happen every day. And then around ten am,
the fallout had started to arrive. And these are accounts
from ronlap at All, which is the closest to Bikini.
The fallout had started to arrive and they were not
sure what was going on. There was men out fishing.
There was also stories these witnesses that prior to this
(23:04):
test the military had gone to and they had movie
nights and they would show the community of movies where
it's snowing.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
Tomorrow, we'll hear more about the consequences of the Bravo
shop for the people who, despite never having any quarrel
with the USA, with the recipient of the largest nuclear
bomb it's ever decimated. It Could Happen Here as a
(23:51):
production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool
Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com, or
check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for
It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia dot com
slash sources.
Speaker 4 (24:07):
Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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